According to Philippe Riviere:
>Hi,
>
>* two problems arise with accents :
>
>1) some browsers don't like URLs containing accentuated letters (it would
>be better to have them escaped). This happens in the results page when your
>search of an accentuated word yields many results : the 1 2 3 4 5 next
>links contain accents

It would certainly be better to not have accentuated letters in URLs
in general. IMHO this is more a matter of proper naming of document
files than of having search engines recognizing them. I'd bet you'll
go into trouble with that with more than just ht://Dig..

This patch will mess up the displayed search results on non-graphical
browsers like Lynx. The space emitted by htsearch certainly has its
reason!

Many people nowadays are unaware of the use of non-graphical browsers.
In fact they are widely used - mainly for administrative purposes on
intranets.. and this is where ht://Dig is also used to make up search
angines for local documentation.

As htsearch cannot determine beforehand what browser requests the query,
the space character is therefore obviously necessary.